Showing papers in "Cognitive Science in 2008"

TL;DR: It is argued that hierarchical methods, generally, and hierarchical Bayesian methods, specifically, can provide a more thorough evaluation of models in the cognitive sciences.

TL;DR: The authors proposed a new model of human concept learning based on Bayesian inference for a grammatically structured hypothesis space and compared the model predictions to human generalization judgments in several well-known category learning experiments, and found good agreement for both average and individual participant generalizations.

TL;DR: Comparing this collaboratively observing environment to four other instructional methods, the results showed that students learned to solve physics problems just as effectively from observing tutoring collaboratively as the tutees who were being tutored individually.

TL;DR: Two experiments investigated the mechanism by which listeners adjust their interpretation of accented speech that is similar to a regional dialect of American English and provide evidence for a context-specific vowel adaptation mechanism that enables a listener to adjust to the dialect of a particular talker.

TL;DR: How and why the P-Cognition thesis may be overly restrictive is explained, risking the exclusion of veridical computational-level theories from scientific investigation, and an argument is made to replace the Tractable Cognition thesis by the FPT-Cognitive thesis as an alternative formalization.

TL;DR: Together, the two studies replicate and extend findings obtained with Western children showing that, in the course of development, different conceptions of death are elaborated-a biological conception in which death terminates living processes and a religious conception inWhich death marks the beginning of a new form of spiritual existence.

TL;DR: The results suggest that the models with the prospect utility function can make generalizable predictions to new conditions, and different learning models are needed for making short-versus long-term predictions on simple gambling tasks.

TL;DR: Examining both simple and more complex problems in two samples of college students provides empirical support for a trade-off between grounded, verbal representations, which show advantages on simpler problems, and abstract, symbolic representations, whose shows advantages on more complexblems.

TL;DR: Overall, it is argued that psychological essentialism, although a useful bias for drawing species-wide inductions, leads individuals to devalue within-species variation and, consequently, to fail to understand natural selection.

TL;DR: Analysis of the co-existence of natural and supernatural explanations for illness and disease transmission in South African communities provided insight into how diverse, culturally constructed belief systems about illness co-exist across development.

TL;DR: These experiments indicate that providing participants with active control of a computer visualization does not necessarily enhance task performance, whereas seeing the most task-relevant information does, and this is true regardless of whether the task- relevant information is obtained actively or passively.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the working memory systems involved in human way-finding and found that encoding wayfinding knowledge interfered with the verbal and with the spatial secondary tasks, and that these interferences were even stronger than the interference of way finding knowledge with the visual secondary task.

TL;DR: Although listeners interpret these accents differently, their interpretive domains overlap and it is demonstrated that L+H* creates a strong bias toward contrast referents whereas H* is compatible with both new and contrast referends.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated for the first time that on-line interpretation of referring expressions in conversation is facilitated by referential domains constrained by pragmatic factors which predict when addressees are likely to encounter temporary ambiguity in language processing.

TL;DR: This finding of a modality-switch effect across perceptual processing and conceptual processing supports the hypothesis that perceptual and conceptual representations are partially based on the same systems.

TL;DR: It is proposed that the observed pervasiveness of 1/f fluctuations in speech reflects the fact that cognitive functions are formed as metastable patterns of activity in brain, body, and environment.

TL;DR: Over the next few years, children come to see discipline-based clusters as having a privileged status, one that may be linked to increasingly sophisticated assumptions about essences for natural kinds, and mechanisms for this developmental shift are examined.

TL;DR: This article investigates an unusual instance of dependency resolution, the processing of negative and positive polarity items, and confirms a surprising prediction of the cue-based retrieval model: Partial-cue matches can give rise to the intrusion of ungrammatical retrieval candidates, leading to both processing slow-downs and errors of judgment.

TL;DR: A computational model for the representation, acquisition, and use of verbs and constructions is presented, founded on a novel view of constructions as a probabilistic association between syntactic and semantic features.

TL;DR: These findings suggest that some effects of labels found early in development may stem from familiarity with human speech, and the possibility of general-auditory factors underlying the effects of words on cognitive development is discussed.

TL;DR: The findings are consistent with the embodied cognition perspective (e.g., Barsalou's, 1999, Perceptual Symbols Theory), which proposes that sensorimotor interactions with the environment are incorporated in semantic knowledge.

TL;DR: This article shows that it is possible to systematically organize more than 50 kinds of illusion into a 7 × 4 matrix of 28 classes and demonstrates that smaller sizes, slower speeds, and greater luminance contrast all tend to have similar perceptual effects.

TL;DR: It is suggested that Zipf's law may result from a hierarchical organization of word meanings over the semantic space, which in turn is generated by the evolution of word semantics dominated by expansion of meanings and competition of synonyms.

TL;DR: This article constructed simple, heuristic approximations to the Bayesian model premised on the hypothesis that individuals have access merely to a sample of k instances drawn from the relevant distribution.

TL;DR: This article illustrates how principles may be combined to explain specific cognitive processes by using these principles to derive SIMPLE, a formal model of memory for serial order, and briefly mentions some extensions to models of identification and categorization.

TL;DR: In this article, a probabilistic model of melody perception is presented, which infers the key of amelody and also judges the probability of the melody itself using Bayesian reasoning: for any surface pattern and underlying structure, we can infer the structure maximizingP(structure|surface) based on knowledge ofP(surface, structure).

TL;DR: A novel experimental method for identifying the biases that guide human inductive inferences, using the responses produced by a participant on one trial to generate the stimuli that either they or another participant will see on the next.

TL;DR: The potential of fMRI to test assumptions about different components in models of complex cognitive tasks, and the power of such data to direct the development of a theory of complex problem solving, are investigated.

TL;DR: This article used the responses produced by a participant on one trial to generate the stimuli that either they or another participant will see on the next trial to reveal the inductive biases of these learners, as expressed in a prior probability distribution over hypotheses.

TL;DR: The predictions that a discourse accompanied by gestures, as compared with a discourse not accompanied with gestures, should result in better recollection of conceptual information, a greater number of discourse-based inferences drawn from the information explicitly stated in the discourse, and poorer recognition of verbatim of the discourse are tested.